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Strangers in their desires and ambitions. Strangers even in their racial consciousness. Between them the barrier was just as high, just as broad, and just as firm as if in Clare did not run that strain of black blood. In truth, it was higher, broader, and firmer; because for her there were perils, not known, or imagined, by those others who had no such secrets to alarm or endanger them.
But that was as far as she got in her rehearsal. For Clare had come softly into the room without knocking, and before Irene could greet her, had dropped a kiss on her dark curls. Looking at the woman before her, Irene Redfield had a sudden inexplicable onrush of affectionate feeling. Reaching out, she grasped Clare’s two hands in her own and cried with something like awe in her voice: “Dear God! But aren’t you lovely, Clare!”
She had that uncomfortable feeling that one has when one has not been wholly kind or wholly true.
“You mean you don’t want me, ’Rene?” Irene hadn’t supposed that anyone could look so hurt. She said, quite gently, “No, Clare, it’s not that. But even you must see that it’s terribly foolish, and not just the right thing.”
“Why, Clare! I didn’t know. Forgive me. I feel like seven beasts. It was stupid of me not to realize.” “No. Not at all. You couldn’t. Nobody, none of you, could,” Clare moaned. The black eyes filled with tears that ran down her cheeks and spilled into her lap, ruining the priceless velvet of her dress. Her long hands were a little uplifted and clasped tightly together. Her effort to speak moderately was obvious, but not successful. “How could you know? How could you? You’re free. You’re happy. And,” with faint derision, “safe.” Irene passed over that touch of derision, for the poignant
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“Well, then, what does it matter? One risk more or less, if we’re not safe anyway, if even you’re not, it can’t make all the difference in the world. It can’t to me. Besides, I’m used to risks. And this isn’t such a big one as you’re trying to make it.”
“I think,” she said at last, “that being a mother is the cruellest thing in the world.”
“It seems rather curious, a man like that, going to a Negro dance.” This, Irene told her, was the year 1927 in the city of New York, and hundreds of white people of Hugh Wentworth’s type came to affairs in Harlem, more all the time. So many that Brian had said: “Pretty soon the coloured people won’t be allowed in at all, or will have to sit in Jim Crowed sections.”
I could kill him! I expect I shall, some day.” “I wouldn’t,” Irene advised her, “you see, there’s still capital punishment, in this state at least. And really, Clare, after everything’s said, I can’t see that you’ve a right to put all the blame on him. You’ve got to admit that there’s his side to the thing. You didn’t tell him you were coloured, so he’s got no way of knowing about this hankering of yours after Negroes, or that it galls you to fury to hear them called niggers and black devils. As far as I can see, you’ll just have to endure some things and give up others. As we’ve said before,
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But Clare—she had remained almost what she had always been, an attractive, somewhat lonely child—selfish, wilful, and disturbing.
She remembered catching glimpses of Clare in the whirling crowd, dancing, sometimes with a white man, more often with a Negro, frequently with Brian. Irene was glad that he was being nice to Clare, and glad that Clare was having the opportunity to discover that some coloured men were superior to some white men.
They’re always raving about the good looks of some Negro, preferably an unusually dark one. Take Hazelton there, for example. Dozens of women have declared him to be fascinatingly handsome. How about you, Irene? Do you think he’s—er—ravishingly beautiful?” “I do not! And I don’t think the others do either. Not honestly, I mean. I think that what they feel is—well, a kind of emotional excitement. You know, the sort of thing you feel in the presence of something strange, and even, perhaps, a bit repugnant to you; something so different that it’s really at the opposite end of the pole from all
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I’ll find I couldn’t pick some of ’em if my life depended on it.” “Well, don’t let that worry you. Nobody can. Not by looking.” “Not by looking, eh? Meaning?” “I’m afraid I can’t explain. Not clearly. There are ways. But they’re not definite or tangible.”
Not from anything she did or said or anything in her appearance. Just—just something. A thing that couldn’t be registered.” “Yes, I understand what you mean. Yet lots of people ‘pass’ all the time.” “Not on our side, Hugh. It’s easy for a Negro to ‘pass’ for white. But I don’t think it would be so simple for a white person to ‘pass’ for coloured.”
“Remember, there’s Margery. Think how glad you’ll be to see her after all this time.” “Children aren’t everything,” was Clare Kendry’s answer to that. “There are other things in the world, though I admit some people don’t seem to suspect it.” And she laughed, more, it seemed, at some secret joke of her own than at her words.
“Don’t think,” she added, “whatever happens, that I’ll ever forget how good you’ve been to me.”
“But it’s true, ’Rene. Can’t you realize that I’m not like you a bit? Why, to get the things I want badly enough, I’d do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away. Really, ’Rene, I’m not safe.” Her voice as well as the look on her face had a beseeching earnestness that made Irene vaguely uncomfortable. She said: “I don’t believe it. In the first place what you’re saying is so utterly, so wickedly wrong. And as for your giving up things—” She stopped, at a loss for an acceptable term to express her opinion of Clare’s “having” nature. But Clare Kendry had begun to cry, audibly, with no effort
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The weather, like people, ought to enter into the spirit of the season.
“Clare! What a nuisance! I didn’t ask her. Purposely.” “I see. Might a mere man ask why? Or is the reason so subtly feminine that it wouldn’t be understood by him?”
“Well, Hugh does think he’s God, you know.” “That,” Irene declared, getting out of bed, “is absolutely not true. He thinks ever so much better of himself than that, as you, who know and have read him, ought to be able to guess. If you remember what a low opinion he has of God, you won’t make such a silly mistake.”
True, his gaze was on her, but in it there was some quality that made her feel that at that moment she was no more to him than a pane of glass through which he stared. At what? She didn’t know, couldn’t guess. And this made her uncomfortable. Piqued her.
For a long minute she sat in strained stiffness. The face in the mirror vanished from her sight, blotted out by this thing which had so suddenly flashed across her groping mind. Impossible for her to put it immediately into words or give it outline, for, prompted by some impulse of self-protection, she recoiled from exact expression.
Satisfied that there lingered no betraying evidence of weeping, she dusted a little powder on her dark-white face and again examined it carefully, and with a kind of ridiculing contempt. “I do think,” she confided to it, “that you’ve been something—oh, very much—of a damned fool.”
A great weariness came over her. Even the small exertion of pouring golden tea into thin old cups seemed almost too much for her. She went on pouring. Made repetitions of her smile. Answered questions. Manufactured conversation. She thought: “I feel like the oldest person in the world with the longest stretch of life before me.”
And all because Clare had a trick of sliding down ivory lids over astonishing black eyes and then lifting them suddenly and turning on a caressing smile. Men like Dave Freeland fell for it. And Brian.
What did it mean? How would it affect her and the boys? The boys! She had a surge of relief. It ebbed, vanished. A feeling of absolute unimportance followed. Actually, she didn’t count. She was, to him, only the mother of his sons. That was all. Alone she was nothing. Worse. An obstacle. Rage boiled up in her.
In that second she saw that she could bear anything, but only if no one knew that she had anything to bear.
What are friends for, if not to help bear our sins?
It hurt. It hurt like hell. But it didn’t matter, if no one knew. If everything could go on as before. If the boys were safe. It did hurt. But it didn’t matter.
She was caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race. Race! The thing that bound and suffocated her. Whatever steps she took, or if she took none at all, something would be crushed. A person or the race. Clare, herself, or the race. Or, it might be, all three. Nothing, she imagined, was ever more completely sardonic.
Irene Redfield wished, for the first time in her life, that she had not been born a Negro. For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one’s own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved. Surely, no other people so cursed as Ham’s dark children.
What she felt was not so much resentment as a dull despair because she could not change herself in this respect, could not separate individuals from the race, herself from Clare Kendry.
“Dad, why is it that they only lynch coloured people?” Ted asked. “Because they hate ’em, son.” “Brian!” Irene’s voice was a plea and a rebuke. Ted said: “Oh! And why do they hate ’em?” “Because they are afraid of them.” “But what makes them afraid of ’em?” “Because—” “Brian!” “It seems, son, that is a subject we can’t go into at the moment without distressing the ladies of our family,” he told the boy with mock seriousness, “but we’ll take it up some time when we’re alone together.”
There’ll be time enough for them to learn about such horrible things when they’re older.” “You’re absolutely wrong! If, as you’re so determined, they’ve got to live in this damned country, they’d better find out what sort of thing they’re up against as soon as possible. The earlier they learn it, the better prepared they’ll be.”
What was the use of our trying to keep them from learning the word ‘nigger’ and its connotation? They found out, didn’t they? And how? Because somebody called Junior a dirty nigger.”
Was it, perhaps, that she had endured all that a woman could endure of tormenting humiliation and fear? Or was it that she lacked the capacity for the acme of suffering? “No, no!” she denied fiercely. “I’m human like everybody else. It’s just that I’m so tired, so worn out, I can’t feel any more.” But she did not really believe that.
Security. Was it just a word? If not, then was it only by the sacrifice of other things, happiness, love, or some wild ecstasy that she had never known, that it could be obtained? And did too much striving, too much faith in safety and permanence, unfit one for these other things?
Yet all the while, in spite of her searchings and feeling of frustration, she was aware that, to her, security was the most important and desired thing in life. Not for any of the others, or for all of them, would she exchange it. She wanted only to be tranquil. Only, unmolested, to be allowed to direct for their own best good the lives of her sons and her husband.
She belonged in this land of rising towers. She was an American. She grew from this soil, and she would not be uprooted.
Strange, that she couldn’t now be sure that she had ever truly known love. Not even for Brian. He was her husband and the father of her sons. But was he anything more? Had she ever wanted or tried for more? In that hour she thought not.
Hard to tell if she’s more jealous of Clare or Brian.
Better, far better, to share him than to lose him completely. Oh, she could close her eyes, if need be. She could bear it. She could bear anything. And there was March ahead. March and the departure of Clare. Horribly clear, she could now see the reason for her instinct to withhold—omit, rather—her news of the encounter with Bellew. If Clare was freed, anything might happen.
“Yes, here. And Felise lives at the very top,” Irene told her. “What on earth for?” “I believe she claims it discourages the casual visitor.” “And she’s probably right. Hard on herself, though.” Brian said: “Yes, a bit. But she says she’d rather be dead than bored.”
